


A Machine Does Not Feel Guilt

by detri



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blow Jobs, Canon Compliant, Child Soldiers, Childhood Trauma, F/M, I hope, Lack of Communication, Language Barrier, Past Sexual Abuse, Sexual Dysfunction, Teen Pregnancy, avoiding discussing guns in depth because i know nothing about them, both are teenagers but w a wide age gap, come get your loveless sex fix here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:09:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27294721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detri/pseuds/detri
Summary: Maiya remembers her past and how Kiritsugu entered it, and how she became the tool he needed.
Relationships: Emiya Kiritsugu/Hisau Maiya
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	A Machine Does Not Feel Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really passionate about Maiya. Her particular brand of fucked-up-ness is quieter and more insidious than almost anyone else in Zero
> 
> Please note the tags, this fic's POV character has a past of sexual abuse and the repercussions of that are the focus of the fic. If anyone has any tags they suggest that I should add please lemme know! I did my best but I'm sure I can do better.

The cold hum and sharp smell of the air conditioner, the starched and bleached sheets in the bed of a cheap hotel room. Maiya could close her eyes and feel that these sensations are all that exist. Her sense of self melts away without concentration.

Kiritsugu is in the bed next to hers. He breathes like he’s still awake. Maiya finds herself leaving her bed for his before she can even think about it, as if acknowledging him is the same as drawing close to his skin.

She slips under the sheets behind him, her chest against his back. They had always slept like this once.

Maiya has been trained for vigilance. She sleeps very little. Kiritsugu sleeps only a little more. She knows he can’t help it, lacking the training she started at the age of five.

When he does sleep, he never sleeps well; she can tell by the way he breathes. If she could share her sleep with him, and bring her blank and formless dreams to him, she would, but he would refuse. He is a man who engages in useless self-flagellation. He puts his heart away to kill and then takes it back out later to mourn. Nothing about him frustrates her more.

Maiya slips her arm around his chest and buries her face in the back of his neck. He smells like today’s cigarettes; but beneath that, his smell is still too clean, too normal. He’s become so far from the Kiritsugu she had first met, stinking of gunpowder and clothes unwashed from three days without rest, smoking packs of cigarettes he wasn’t old enough to buy, staking out a house from the shitty hotel across the street—she remembers watching him through the whirring blades of a clattering box fan. What city had that been in? It had been so hot and humid, and there had been no air conditioning. He’d finally taken the shot and then collapsed back into his chair with the cigarette still dangling from his lips, unresponsive as consternation rose in the street below. This is the kind of fond adolescent memory Hisau Maiya carries with her.

What kind of memory is Kiritsugu carrying now? If it keeps him up all night, he’ll lose some of the precious few hours he’s set aside to rest during this Holy Grail War.

She nuzzles against him. He still makes no indication of noticing her. If he’s far gone, it’s better to just tire him out. She reaches into his pants, grasping him through his boxers.

At first he swats her hand away, as if startled, and it stings her. For a second, resentment for Irisviel, a woman she’s never met, flares inside her, but she discards it. There’s no point.

Then he pulls himself from her embrace and climbs on top of her. Maiya feels a warm relief spread inside of her. He hasn’t rejected her.

Maiya pulls him down for a kiss and starts to stroke him through his boxers again—he needs a lot of help sometimes. She worries that, in the time since he’s married Irisviel, he’s become a person who equated sex with love. Or maybe this is just a part of getting older. Before, in their traveling life, he had always been able to start and finish quickly, though it had still taken forever to wear him down, whole days of lingering too close to him and touching him before he’d eventually given in for something that had been over in minutes.

Sex had been physical exercise, a wordless bonding activity that worked fine for two teenagers who would go days without speaking. Even so, sometimes he had held her afterward like he was afraid of losing her.

Maiya didn’t want to be the face of the faceless innocents he had committed to save. That was why she had resolved to be his sexual partner in the first place.

Kiritsugu is rutting into her hand while burying his face in the crook of her shoulder—she is the only one who has ever seen the Mage Killer like this. Surely this is not how he has sex with his wife. Maiya strokes him more attentively, attuned to his shudders as she uses both her hands.

“I got condoms while I was fetching supplies today. In addition, I am on contraceptives. If you wanted to be inside me, it wouldn’t be a problem.” The first thing she has said for hours.

“It should be fine,” Kiritsugu mutters, barely words.

“Or I could use my mouth.”

“No.” She had expected that much. She suspects that receiving oral sex makes him feel guilty.

“I’m going to take off my clothes.” Maiya relinquishes her grip and starts to undress. Kiritsugu wordlessly does the same, as if she had prompted him to.

She doesn’t have any particular positive reaction to seeing him naked. But she’s always pleased by the skin-to-skin contact. Before she had started sleeping with him, she had never had sex with anyone while naked.

When she’d first told him that, he’d looked like she’d thrown a bucket of cold water over him.

He grasps her breasts as soon as he can get at them, even taking one of her nipples into his mouth. He’s never done that before. His stubble scratches her skin, and she doesn’t hate how it feels, but she doesn’t want him there.

“Kiritsugu, don’t.”

“Sorry.”

“Kiss me?”

“Yeah.”

He’s never been a good kisser, and she likes that about him. She likes that the Mage Killer is passive and helpless as soon as she sticks her tongue in his mouth.

She pursues this kiss to erase the memory of his mouth on her breast.

\--

Maiya had never been able to breastfeed her son. She had had him for only a day, and the milk wouldn’t come. The old woman who watched the girls had fed him with formula, but Maiya had never even been able to hold him and give him the bottle. Then one day, the old woman took him out of the room. She would never bring him back.

Maiya finally felt like she understood what ‘despair’ meant on that day. For all of her fourteen years, she had felt nothing but a white emptiness in her heart. But now, for the first time, that emptiness turned black.

She laid on her cot, ignoring the other girls who lay breathing in the thick air all around her. Silently, she prayed for the day she would once again be given a gun. Sometimes the sound of battle reached the nursery at night. She mimed firing off into the ceiling. Her son wasn’t coming back. She only hoped that by the time he was grown up, the fighting would be over. Maiya knew that whether the war was won or not would have nothing to do with her, that the result would be the same whether she shot a few more men or laid here for the rest of eternity, but if she fought and died it would at least be something to do.

In those days without her son, that was what Maiya sought. To be busy, and then to be dead.

Until that day.

She remembers so little of it reliably. There had been a fire at the nursery—or an explosion. The enemy had found their operation—or her side had been told to erase it. She had been handed a gun—or she had simply picked one up.

Scenes of fire and chaos like this all ran together in her mind.

But she was months out of practice—they’d taken her off the front lines when she’d gotten too big. Now her hands were clumsy and her reload times were slow. One of the officers was berating her when his head exploded.

She was out of practice, but not incompetent. She leveled her gun in the direction of the attacker.

Her instincts must have impressed him.

\--

Maiya was the only survivor of all the young mothers sequestered away in the nursery. Or at least, she was the only one who Kiritsugu had saved. To her, there was no difference.

He’d bundled her into the back of a sturdy truck and jumped into the truck bed after her, draping a tarp over her as if to hide her. The man at the wheel surely noticed her anyway, but he must not have cared. He stared right ahead at the dirt road, smoking a cigarette. Kiritsugu lit a cigarette too. Maiya watched his hands, his lips, and realized that though he was dusty and unshaven he was hardly much older than she was. He was younger than the men who had fathered her child, at least.

He looked at her looking at him, and his eyes reflected nothing. No disdain, no scheming, no lust, no pity. He simply regarded her, as he exhaled smoke. It disappeared behind them, down the winding jungle road. That nothingness was the same kind she felt.

\--

He comes on her naked thigh, burying a groan in his throat as if he’s embarrassed to be making a noise. Maiya pets him through it, running a hand through his hair as he tries to breathe through the sheets he’s hidden his face in. Already she feels the tightness in his body melting away. The weariness has finally caught up with him; now he can rest. Her last task of the evening has been completed. Maiya tries to roll out from under him without disturbing him, but reconsiders. She wants to keep feeling him on her skin.

It is a little disappointing that he hadn’t wanted to be inside her tonight. It’s frustrating, because she’s not done, and won’t be sleeping tonight anyway. Maiya sighs. Might as well stay with him for a while longer in case his dreams wake him. Maybe try to finish by herself. In the corner of her eye, her familiars flit in and out with their recorded surveillance. Maiya is never off duty.

–

The trip into the city had taken hours. Maiya had never surrendered to sleep, though, and never relinquished her hold on her gun. Kiritsugu had stayed awake too. Through the night, she could see the glowing end of his cigarette.

Maiya still remembers how her heart had stirred at the nighttime bustle of the city, even though it was nothing compared to the cities she had been to since, not a Shanghai or a Hong Kong or a Tokyo or New York. It was the nervous and ramshackle shell of a city that had been emptied, its citizens exiled into camps. But it had its neon lights and its hot food and its civilians, as much as anyone was a civilian at that time, in that place.

Kiritsugu took her into a corner shop and spoke something to the shopkeeper. English. Maiya held her gun and no one tried to take it from her. The shopkeeper moved a shelf, and Kiritsugu climbed the stairs behind it.

The apartment above it was obviously his. Discarded clothes and empty bowls littered the floor, disassembled weapons around a rumpled cot. And he left her there. _Is he stupid?_ Maiya had no reason to go, but if she wanted to, she could arm herself any way she wanted. She could slip out the open window and into the night. If he was trying to take a prisoner he was being extraordinarily careless.

But he seemed to have other intentions entirely. He returned after a few minutes, with two bowls of noodles. They were hot and smelled good. Maiya tried not to focus on them.

He withheld the food from her until she gave him her gun, asking for it in words she didn’t understand, then different words she didn’t understand, until finally she heard him haltingly try her language.

“Gun please.”

She gave it to him. But he still made no motion to give her the food she wanted so badly.

“Clothes please.”

Ah. There it was. Maiya hardly felt disappointed; she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and there it was. And now she knew. There wasn’t anything she could do about it. There was no use feeling any kind of way about it. It was already an act she was used to.

She pulled her gown over her head, rolled it up, and handed it to him. He walked around her, flicking his cigarette ash onto the floor. Later she would realize he was checking for injuries. But there was nothing to see; they had taken good care of her while she had been carrying a child for them.

For now it just seemed like a baffling lack of action. Kiritsugu gave her her food and they ate in silence. As morning dawned, he gave her the cot and let her sleep in it alone.

From that night on, they were companions.

Although silence was the status quo, he did slowly teach her English. One of the first things he taught her was his name.

He pointed at himself. “My name is Kiritsugu.”

She nodded, eager to show that she already understood but needing to wrap her tongue around the strange sound. “Keri—“

“No. You’re already wrong. ‘Kiritsugu.’”

He would scold her every time until she got it right.

It wasn’t long until they moved out of the city, moved out of the little apartment above the shop. Kiritsugu must have done everything he came to this country to do. Maiya watched him count bundles of bills she didn’t know the origin or value of.

Then they’d been off, in the back of a truck again. Maiya watched in disbelief as they rolled along the river for days. Were they leaving the country? Were they leaving the world of war? The thought made her uneasy.

But she was reassured by the idea that she couldn’t imagine Kiritsugu going anywhere else. Even now he was cleaning a rifle as he watched the road and smoked. Just like on the first day they’d met, she thought again how blank his eyes looked. How precise his movements were. Like he was a machine for killing.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She had learned enough to understand the question, but not enough to answer it—rather, to convey that she had no answer for it. She could only shake her head.

He nodded.

They only ever said as much as they needed, right from the start.

By traveling with him—first by car, then by boat, and then in a small plane soaring high over the jungles that still burned and flashed with combat—Maiya learned that Kiritsugu was a loner within a loose network of mercenaries from all over, some of them from her country, and some foreigners, white or black men. Within this network, she was a new element, but not widely questioned. She stayed in his shadow, absorbing more English every day.

One day, she had been given a haircut and a bundle of clothes.

Maiya treasures this day, in her own cold way. But she also remembers that that was the first time she saw a light in Kiritsugu’s eyes that made her uneasy, though she didn’t understand why yet, or have a name for it.

“What are these?” She unfolded the clothes and held them up. A white polo shirt was in her hands, and a navy pleated skirt fell to the floor.

“Clothes for you. You can’t keep wearing my things.”

Maiya turned the shirt over in her hands. It was too worn to be new, but still so white. “Why these?”

“One of the guys found them. Got left behind when the village was evacuated. GIs were coming that way.” He picked up the skirt and pressed it into her hands. “I don’t know much about clothes, but I thought...these work for a girl your age.”

“Oh. Yes, I guess my clothes are a poor fit.” Maiya ran a thumb over the pleated fabric.

“I bartered for this, too. You can put your hair up with it.” Kiritsugu dug in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a pink hairclip. Maiya had never owned such a thing. She had never felt deprived, or spent time crying for her lack of pink clothes or skirts. But she took it, because the mercenary who had picked her up and torn her away from the front lines decided she should have one.

Kiritsugu didn’t smile; in those days, his face was unused to it. But a shimmer of life flickered in his eyes as she fumbled to pin her hair away from her face.

In 1994, Maiya can name what it was that made her feel sick as she pinned up her hair, what made her feel ashamed to wear the skirt even though he never once looked at her legs.

Tenderness.

The disease that ate away at the Mage Killer she looked up to.

Maiya dressed in the outfit in the privacy of the room she had been given all for herself on this thrown-together base. That day, a man took her picture. She stood against the wall and stared into the lens, unsmiling. And by that same night, Kiritsugu gave her a fabricated passport. Maiya looked at her own face on the piece of paper. She looked so somber, the expression in her eyes older than the shape of her face. The hairclip Kiritsugu had given her made her feel like someone else. For all she knew, its original owner was dead; but it was hers now. This girl with the grim face and childish hairclip was her.

“See,” Kiritsugu said. “Now you’re unassuming schoolgirl Hisau Maiya.”

The happiness buried in his quiet voice made her flinch.

–

Maiya should not have worried about leaving the battlefield. Her first passport was merely a gateway to an endless parade of glimpsed and inflicted carnage, her new life one of assassinations and terrorist acts conducted for reasons that were beyond her and causes she was unaffiliated with. It all suited her very well. She was Kiritsugu’s eyes and ears, watching for openings or dangers he could not see; his arm, holding another weapon. Sometimes there were periods where the two of them took no lives, and he taught her magecraft, something her child had been bred for but that she had never been taught herself. But that was only for a few days at a time. Kiritsugu was restless, almost frantic, as if he wanted to take on every job in the world himself. As if he strove to become a force of nature, a gale that swept the planet and extinguished life as it passed. Sometimes it seemed to her like he was very close to becoming that force—but then he would run out of breath, and grow weary all at once. When he ran out of breath, that was when he would look at her, instead of merely looking to her to hand him his guns. She had been with him while he’d laid bombs around an entire building to kill the man who hid inside, not caring about the passersby on the street. She’d seen how he’d pushed the button to bring it down without remorse. But she’d also seen how he looked at her when he thought she wasn’t looking; a tender, guilty look. Maiya had no need for it. Eyes of pity roused more disgust in her still heart than eyes of lust.

She doesn’t remember if it had been a year before she buckled under the weight of that look, or if it had been even less. She remembers the city, for some reason: Taipei. The place: a hotel. Had it been a love hotel she had rented so he could rest for a few hours before their flight, or was that just her coloring the memory so her actions would make more sense to her? She remembers she had declined sleep herself in favor of reviewing their next job.

“Are you sure you don’t want to rest?” Kiritsugu was sitting against the headboard of the bed, not committing to the sleep he had claimed he wanted. Watching her as if she needed to be watched.

Maiya checked one of their guns’ sights, pointing it out into the neon night. “Were you hoping I’d cuddle up next to you?”

“Please don’t say things like that.”

“Then stop acting like that.”

“I’m allowed to be concerned with my assistant’s health.”

Maiya closed the suitcase. “Kiritsugu, sleep if you’re going to sleep, or concern yourself with my health, if you don’t think I can manage it myself. But whatever your task is, please focus on it, and I’ll focus on mine.”

He was silent for a while, which was characteristic of their conversations. Maiya already began to disregard him.

She wandered about the tiny room, absently wiping cigarette ash from the bedside table, watching the harshly glowing traffic lights in the canyon of the street far beneath their window.

Then. “Maiya. Are you happy doing this?”

She didn’t even need to think about it. It was an immaterial question. “My ‘happiness’ has never been a factor in my decisions.”

“Would it be your decision? To kill for a living?”

“It doesn’t have to be. It was yours.”

He looked for a second as if he had been slapped.

Maiya remembers how enticing he had looked then, just by virtue of being silent and still. Unspeaking. But gentle. Infuriatingly so. That gentleness was incompatible with everything about them. It upset her as much as anything could upset her.

Maiya climbed onto the bed, and she saw how he tracked her, trying to make sense of what she wanted.

She kissed the front of his boxer shorts, then, slowly, pulled them down.

Parts of this memory are so vivid. How the harsh lights cast him into sharp relief, made his skin light up and made him look ugly from her worm’s eye view. How for a moment her breath caught in her throat because she remembered the barracks and how the men had shone a flashlight in her face to watch her as she got out of her cot and onto her knees. But she swallowed down the useless fear and focused on the work.

She knew how to get him hard, even without his consent. This was an autonomous response, the same as a hanged man emptying his bowels. The human body is only a machine. Her mind was empty, the same as it always is when she focuses on a task.

When he was erect, she tucked her hair behind one ear and took him into her mouth, as far as she could manage. _It’s much easier when I want to do it,_ she thought.

Kiritsugu took in a sharp breath. Maiya’s eyes flicked to his face and she saw that he was watching her, unblinking and still, as if he was afraid to move and be seen.

For a moment, now that she thinks back on it, she wonders if they are more similar than she knows. If he had also learned at a young age to be pliant and to follow instruction. To be used for adults’ inscrutable goals.

If that was the case, he should have understood her better.

Deliberately, she drew him out of her mouth with a wet pop, then took him in again. Her eyes never left his face.

He said nothing, stayed still as if pinned, his head rigid against the headboard. A shaky breath left his lips.

For the first time then Maiya began to guess what she now knows to be true. Kiritsugu is, in the most basic and all-encompassing way, a masochist. His way of life is antithetical to how all other humans try to live; he flies to things that cause him pain. When misfortunes befall him, he accepts them as punishment, with open arms.

She understands this now, but that doesn’t mean she feels guilty about it. He simply is the person he is, and so is she.

As she fellated him, he kept totally still, not encouraging or discouraging it, but clenching his fists in the sheets. Maiya herself got no pleasure from it besides the weird, savage, cold satisfaction of hearing his labored breaths.

 _Don’t pull away,_ she thought, silently challenging him as she worked. _Don’t reprimand me, or try to manage me. Look at me, and understand what you picked up when you reached out to me._

_Use me for what I am._

_And accept what I want to give you._

At first, she thought she would be unsuccessful. That the type of affection he held for her would overcome his biology, and he would eventually push her away, and tomorrow would be unchanged, their relationship would be unchanged. But she won over his scruples. He came in her mouth with a curse and she sputtered it out over his cock, then spit in the sheets. And her hold over him was broken.

He stumbled away from her on shaky legs, getting up so fast it was like she’d hurt him. For a moment she saw his eyes burning wet in his prematurely aging face.

He saw her. He saw her, for the tool that she was, and it scared him. Like an illusion had been lifted from him. Like he couldn’t delude himself anymore.

Maiya wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Going out for a smoke,” he said in a low, hoarse voice, turning away from her and lighting a cigarette already. Escaping as quickly as he could.

She nodded.

She’d never known how he’d felt about it. She’d hoped that his fantasy of rescuing some little lost girl had been shattered; but all she really knew was that the next time she came to him, he didn’t push her away.

–

In an emptied-out apartment in Berlin, he told her.

“I’m getting married.”

She surveyed his face. He wasn’t one for jokes.

“Acht, the old Einzbern mage. When we talked, and I took on the long job for him, he gave me his daughter.”

The long job: they’d talked about it for a while, effectively a false retirement. A long con leading to one final betrayal. Maiya knew as much as was appropriate.

He could have withheld this detail. It wasn’t crucial.

Kiritsugu rubbed the back of his neck. “I just thought I should tell you.”

“I trust your judgment.”

If he had been concerned about their relationship, Maiya hoped her reaction alone would tell him there had been none.

Maiya conducted Kiritsugu’s business on the outside, picking up the side jobs she needed to stay fed and armed, brushing off the hangers-on who came sniffing after her. She saw him a few times a year, maybe a few times every few years. The scent of cigarettes gradually left his skin, his suits got newer and more well-cut. He never did get the hang of shaving regularly. And while at first he talked only about her jobs and her magic instruction, gradually he talked about himself, and names started to creep in—Iri, Illya. When he said them, his eyes grew soft.

But he was older now. He was starting to learn: softness would hurt him more than callousness ever had.

Maiya remembers that one visit, how he had grabbed her and pushed her right up against the very door of the Einzbern fortress itself, kissing her with an intensity that scared her. Then he crumpled his shaking hands into her coat and just like always, Maiya understood him without words. It was the first time he initiated it. She obliged him. She would always oblige him. Once again, she would be a tool of punishment for him.

\--

Maiya comes to herself and realizes she’s completely forgotten about masturbating, and her hand has been uselessly still between her legs while she just loses herself in memory.

She gives up the pretense of even trying to cum by herself. There’s no point. She’s never managed it. He’s expressed concern about it, he’s really tried to get her off and she appreciates the effort, but it’s another one of the things he does that’s unnecessary. Managing to have an orgasm is not her job. Her body performs the necessary functions, and that has never been needed. It is as excessive as grief, or resentment, or rage.

The barest smile comes to her lips as she pulls the sheet over his shoulders and takes another breath of his scent. She will never smile more than this. Her pleasure is measured, and joy is unreasonable. Only the amount of emotion that is practical and sustainable; this is how she has survived this far. ‘Happiness’ is a concept she has never understood; but she does understand other concepts. Satisfaction at finding something so neat, tidy, and clean of unnecessary sentimentality, passionately passionless, perfect for a pair like them whose bond is forged purely by necessity and utility. He asks nothing of her she cannot give. Demands no emotions she has pruned away. He had needed a tool, and she is more than happy to serve as one, whenever he needs it. If she was the one who had forced them into this shape, she won’t deny it. A machine does not feel guilt. It only does its work.

**Author's Note:**

> After scouring everything I could find in canon to make sure it had never been mentioned, discussing it with a couple of friends, and pulling an age for Maiya out of my ass (25 as of F/Z) I decided on Cambodia as her country of origin, but left it vague in the fic itself.


End file.
